


Masked Stranger

by Return009



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Clexa, F/F, Halloween, kiss in the rain, radiation, spiderman - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-15 21:59:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12329700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Return009/pseuds/Return009
Summary: Clarke and Lexa are at odds from the very second they meet. And their misunderstandings only deepen when Lexa runs away from an accident that almost kills her because she was bitten by a radioactive spider. Now they must learn how to tolerate each other when one of them works for the other’s mother.But their road to civility, and possibility even more, is a bumpy one if one of them has an ulterior motive.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I had initially posted a Spiderman AU on a different account, but that was mostly chunks and pieces that I had written out of order. Although it was a lot of fun to write and read the fic that way, I have ultimately decided to piece it all together from the very beginning for the sake of coherency. 
> 
> So, here is the first chapter.
> 
> Thank you to the wonderful Beta who is also my beta and so much more. <3

 

Four.

 

She had set four alarms to go off on her phone, but judging by the amount of sunlight on her pillowcase, she’d wager that she had reached for that snooze button more than once this morning.

 

_Ring. Ring._

 

A head emerges from the white, linen sheets to inspect the noise coming from the kitchen. Four months at this place and she still doesn’t know what the switch next to the sink does, but she’s sure it couldn’t actually call her.

 

“Oh.”

 

She drops her head back down. Sometimes, she forgets that she has a house phone.

 

_Clarke, it’s your mother. I can’t get through to your cell. Call me back._

She gropes around the bed for it but feels something knock against her foot instead.

 

“Dammit,” she curses, as she tries to awkwardly maneuver the thing into her hands without having to get up again.

 

7:30AM and _No SIM card detected_.

 

“Time to get this thing replaced.”

 

She buries her face into the soft pillow and takes a deep breath one last time before willing herself out of bed.

 

“Time to get _that_ washed.”

 

 ---

 

Her mother, like everyone else, did not believe her when she said that her cellphone has been a temperamental piece of junk the past few days.

 

_“Why does it work one day and not the other?”_

_“Something about the SIM card. I’m going to have it replaced.”_

_“Hmm.”_

Either the landline was transmitting weird signals to her phone or her mother was assuming that she was evading her phone calls again.

 

“ _Mom, I remember our brunch tomorrow. Don’t worry.”_

It takes her a good ten minutes to get out the door and down to the car because the elevator is broken. And then three tries to get out of the tight parking spot because the car behind her was practically on her ass.

 

“I hope you get a ticket, buddy. Parking here is only for residents.”

 

She tells herself that she’s going to move out of the city when she gets married. She’s going to raise her kids in the suburbs where she doesn’t have to feel like she has to share elbow room with someone in public.

 

“Whoever you are, you’re gonna have to build our child a tree house in the backyard.”

 

A large crumb falls into her lap as she tries to beat the yellow light to turn left onto North St.

 

“Shit. Shouldn’t have done that.”

 

A minor feeling of paranoia sets in, and she checks her rear view mirror for any flashing blue sirens, instead, only catching the reflection of a frazzled woman with a mouthful of blueberry muffin.

 

“Dr. Griffin. You are flawless,” she says with a cheeky smile. “If it---“

 

The rest of her breakfast comes flying onto the floor when a black car on what can only be described as a suicide mission cuts her off.

 

“Son of a---“

 

She licks the crumbs off her thumb and decides that it isn’t worth it today.

 

But by the time she pulls to the stoplight ahead, the same black car taunts her in the next lane with its owner sitting mere feet away from her with the window down.

 

“Hey, jerk! You cut me off back there!” She shouts.

 

The woman, who is prettier than she is a good driver, takes one look at Clarke and rolls up her window without uttering a single word.

 

\---

 

Lexa thinks it’s a shame that for someone so attractive, the woman seems to talk with a blow horn. If all of the pretty women in New York loved to yell out of their cars at other drivers this early in the morning as much as the blonde next to her did, she might have to consider taking the train from this point forward.

 

She looks over at the other car again through her tinted window.

 

_I hate to be the person who has to put up with her._

As soon as the light turns green, she pulls ahead without giving the woman another look. And by the time she parks her car in front of the UPS store, Lexa has already forgotten about the whole incident.

 

“Hey, Derek.” She immediately notices the empty space when she walks in. “Are you guys moving?”

 

“Closing down.” The teenage boy tries his best to hide his disappointment, but Lexa remembers how he told her that this was his first real job outside of delivering the newspaper.

 

“Why? This is the nearest shipping facility to my apartment.” And it is the only one on the way to her new job at Griffin and Parker.

 

“We don’t get enough customers,” he says.

 

“Damn, sorry about that.” Lexa looks at the narrow space the business operates in, curious about what it could be turned into. “So who’s going to take over?”

 

“The phone place next door wants to expand. So they’re going to knock down this wall.”

 

“I see.” Lexa holds her tongue about how that is a smart business venture. “I’m sorry, Derek.” She offers him a few more words of consolation before heading out the door.

 

“Good luck at your new job today!” He calls out from behind the counter. 

 

The first thing Lexa sees when she gets out the store is that same white Toyota from before pull up behind her.

 

She looks at her watch and then at the woman exiting her car. If she isn’t careful, this could take up a lot of her time.

 

“It’s you again.” The woman says with a frown. “5KSSAD.” She sounds off with Lexa’s whole license plate number before accusing her of ruining a perfect blueberry muffin.

 

“I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am,” Lexa says sarcastically.

  
  
“Wow, you’re a smartass. Too bad you never learned how to drive.”

  
“Look,” Lexa deadpans, “I don’t have time for this.”

 

\----

 

A gust of wind coming from the east side of the river blows at Clarke’s back and sends a shiver up her spine. She takes one step forward into Lexa’s space and levels a haughty stare at her.

 

“Am I making you late?”

 

Lexa crosses her arms in front of her chest.

 

“Yes, in fact, you are.”

 

Fifty feet away, at a cross street before the post office and a sandwich shop, a red sedan runs a stoplight and misses a white delivery truck by a hair before it collides head on with a light pole. The driver of the truck loses control as he tries to maneuver it out of the way and tips over, sending orange sparks from the ground as its body slides along the street.

 

“Oh my God.”

 

They both watch the scene unfold in front of them in horror, unable to get any closer.

 

“Call 911,” Lexa says, almost spellbound.

 

“I…”

 

Her words come out louder this time as she starts to run in the direction of the accident once both vehicles have stopped.

 

“Call 911!”

 

There is a sense of urgency running through her vein as she rounds the car to retrieve her cell from the cup holder that makes Clarke forget one utterly important matter.

 

_No SIM card detected._

Her fingers fumble the numbers twice.

“Work goddammit, work!” She yells at it, desperate to hear a ring on the line.

 

“Yes!”

 

She presses the phone closer to her ear, not waiting for the operator to come on before she runs to assist Lexa at the sight of the accident.

 

“South and 3rd. There’s a terrible car collision. EMS needed.” She discards the phone mere feet away from the sedan that looks awfully... _crumbled._ That is the only way Clarke could describe it.

 

Lexa emerges from the driver’s side with a somber expression on her face and stops Clarke from getting any closer.

  
“Don’t. He’s already gone.”

 

Her stomach falls at the words, but she tries to reassure Lexa, nonetheless.

 

“It’s okay. I’m a doctor.”

 

She walks past the woman and looks into the driver’s side, already expecting the worst when she saw how much blood was on the ground. But the man or woman in the driver’s seat was so disfigured that it made even her want to gag.

 

“Let’s check on the other driver,” she says, solemnly.

 

They run to the white truck flipped on its hood, with the wheels still turning on its axle. Clarke tries to pry the door open to the driver’s side.

 

“Hey! Can you hear me?” She beats on the window when the door refuses to give.

 

Nothing.

 

Lexa disappears for a moment and then a loud shatter is heard.

 

“One person. Female,” she yells out as she climbs in through the passenger side. A second elapses before she speaks again.

 

“There’s a pulse.”

 

A click sounds and the driver’s door swings open, revealing a woman with a severe abdominal injury. Clarke wonders if she will even be able to contain the bleeding before EMS arrives.

 

She pulls the woman out, careful not to hurt her even more. She then moves her to the sidewalk where a man on a bike lends them his sweater to help control the bleeding.

 

“Is there anyone else in the truck?”

 

For some reason, Clarke expects Lexa to answer the question. But when she realizes that the man is staring at her, she looks back at the scene of the accident.

 

“I…I don’t know.”

Clarke gives him orders to stay with the injured woman before she heads back to where Lexa is. As she approaches the truck for the second time, she sees a stream of smoke blow out of the engine. And then what looks and smells like gasoline color the ground with a rainbow film.

 

“Hey!” She circles the truck. “What are you still doing---“

 

But the woman nearly runs her over charging in the opposite direction.

 

“Hey! Come back!” Clarke yells after her but Lexa continues forward without a word.

 

_What the hell is her problem?_

Clarke walks over to the side of the truck to try to understand what Lexa was running from. In the distance, she hears the woman start her car and speed down the road the other way. She looks at the wall of the cargo box destroyed by the collision. _What was so terrifying?_ A sign, now indiscernible as it caves inward. _Probably the painted logo of the company_. She steps over a broken side view mirror to take a peek inside. Two boxes with what looks like the same sign lay broken open, and a strange liquid leaks from a glass capsule shattered on the floor.

 

She tries to make out the word on one of the boxes.

 

“Radio…”

 

_Shit_

 

She stumbles backward and her face grows cold.

 

\---

 

She’s going to die if she doesn’t make it to the hospital soon. Her arm has become significantly swollen at this point and she swears she’s sitting in a boiling pot of water.

 

Lexa tries to blink away the mental fog, but her vision is starting to give. The parked car on the right side of the road keeps flashing in and out of sight and she’s afraid that she’ll get into an accident before she even makes it to the emergency room.

 

She pulls over and breathes through her mouth. Her throat is starting to close up at this point, but she hopes that she’s able to make one more call.

 

She throws her entire body across the transmission tunnel to retrieve the phone from inside her bag on the passenger seat.

 

9…1…1.

 

But unconsciousness overtakes her and she slips into blackness before the call could go out.

 

\--- 

 

Clarke curses her fate. She is a doctor, not a stinkin’ bomb technician. Yet, somehow, she finds herself trying to remove two boxes of radioactive material from a truck so that a dirty bomb doesn’t explode in the middle of New York City before noon.

 

“Crap. Crap. Crap.” She repeats the word over to herself as she works the boxes off the truck and curses at the woman who ran off without a word at the sight of danger.

 

 _Coward_.

 

“Stop!” Before she knows it, a group of people in masks and white overalls are approaching her from the other side of the street.

 

Her eyes grow moist as she runs to them.

 

“There are two boxes of radioactive material on the sidewalk,” she chokes back tears, “and that truck could explode any second now.”

 

“Okay, ma’am. We’ll handle it from here. Take her to decontamination.”

A woman in the same white suit appears and leads Clarke to a makeshift shower a safe distance away from the scene where she's told to place her clothes in a bag and shower. As the water washes the radiation particles off her body, she wonders where the woman in the black car from earlier has gone to. 

 

\----

 

She was confident that she’d either be lying in a bed at a hospital or on a cold table at the morgue by the end of the day, so it confuses Lexa when she wakes up in her car.

 

The sun is out and the streets are quiet. She wonders what time it is because the tiny clock on her dashboard doesn’t seem to be working. The only thing she sees when she looks out her window is a small orange light in the corner. It brightens and then dims with no real pattern. She runs two fingers along her arm to feel for the bite marks she had sustained earlier, just to make sure that the experience wasn’t a dream. They are still there but only faintly now. Lexa wonders if she had died and crossed over to some strange threshold for the dead.

 

Her car only makes an electrical sound like it’s out of gas when she turns the key. And it is then that she remembers that she never turned off the engine.

 

She tries to dial out, but her phone won’t start either.

 

“Crap.” She throws it back down on the passenger seat.

 

Against her better judgment, she decides to leave her car and look for help down the dark street. Her legs are a little wobbly when she first stands on them, but other than some stiffness, she doesn’t feel like she is dying from toxic venom like before.

 

Lexa isn’t sure which way she should head so she allows her ears to guide her. She walks past the tiny orange light from before and watches it fall to the ground and go out.

 

“What are you doing out and about this late at night, pretty thing?”

 

 _Men_. She’s sure he’d call her that even if she had bad skin and an unfortunate face, just as long as he knew she had breasts and long hair.

 

Lexa makes no effort to respond to the man and continues down the street to where she thinks she hears traffic in the distance.

 

“Oh, hey. Don’t be mean.”

 

He speaks again, and she can hear him approach her from behind.

 

Lexa spins around and warns the man. “I’ll break your arm faster than you can call for help.”

 

He laughs at her.

 

“Sweetie, this is my street. Who the fuck do you think you are?” He leans in closer, the smell of cigarette strong on his clothes. “I could kill you if I wanted to.”

 

“Could you not get so close to me?” Lexa says, unfazed. “You stink.”

 

A loud, cancerous chuckle rings out from across the street.

 

“Antoine, you gonna let that girl talk to you like that?”

 

The comment seems to provoke the man as he tries to grab Lexa by the arm. But she makes him miss and then twists it in a way that his cry would wake up the entire neighborhood.

 

“You bitch!”

 

Antoine’s friends finally come to his aid --- all five of them. And they are unusually big even for a street gang from what she could tell in the dark.

 

Lexa hears a gun cock and senses it point at her.

 

“You fellas have to use a gun to fight a girl?”

 

“I don’t need a gun to kick your ass.”

 

He moves in closer and tries to knock her over with the base of it. Strangely, she knows exactly when and where it's coming from, even in the dark. But as she raises her hand to block his attack, she feels something shoot out from her wrist. The thing seems to have trapped the man’s hand in place like a web.

 

“What the hell?” He asks dumbly, and the other men charge at her.

 

Lexa recoils and the web retreats into her wrist. But she doesn’t have time to think twice about it before she aims it back at them again. The web shoots out like before and engulfs the group before pinning them down onto the ground.

 

“What is this?!” They try to kick and yell their way out of it while Lexa stands there, dumbstruck by what just happened. She stares down at her hands, or at least, what she can make of them in the dark.

 

_Was that a trick of the eye or did I just…_

She starts to run in the direction of the distant sound she heard earlier, hoping to find a source of light to aid her. It is a longer street than she had expected, but somehow, she gets to the end of it very quickly. She looks back to where she came from. That must have been at least half a mile.

 

She checks her pulse, and it’s beating at a normal rate for having just having run that far. Lexa wonders if she actually died back there in the car.

 

_Silly, you have a pulse. That means that you’re alive._

She looks around and sees a light post about twenty feet away.

 

“Okay, let’s try this again.”

 

She aims her wrist at the tall structure and, just like before, a web shoots out from the center of her wrist and hits it dead on.

 

“Christ!” Lexa jumps back and the web returns into place.

 

 

This time, she aims her wrist at a building wall. It sticks and instead of recoiling, she tugs on it.

 

 _Shit_.

 

The motion flings her into the air and straight at the brick wall. But instead of smashing into it like putty, she lands with her hands and feet. Amazingly, they cling to the wall and allow her to defy gravity. She lifts one hand to inspect the underside. Nothing looks abnormal, but somehow she’s able to scale a building now.

 

Once she gets to the top, Lexa plops herself down onto the ground to go over the earlier events of today to see if they would be able to shed some light on her new special abilities.

 

She runs her fingers over the spider bite on her arm again when she thinks about the accident from this morning. When she feels only a smooth patch of skin where the bite used to be only hours earlier, Lexa stands to her feet.

 

_It’s time to find some answers._

She looks out into the city and counts the buildings in her path. She wonders how long it’ll take her to get to Raven's.

 

\---

 

The wind pushes the door open the second the doorknob turns and Clarke falls forward with the rain on her back.

 

“Ugh.”

 

Immediately, she spins around and uses her weight to close it shut. And the lock gives a click at the turn. The last time she forgot about it, the thugs in the neighborhood spray-painted every tenant’s door with phallic symbols and she had to spend the remainder of her afternoon scrubbing it down with a bucket of water and soap.

 

“Gross.” She scrunches her nose after getting a good whiff of the place.

 

Something about the weather the past few days has corrupted her apartment building, making the hallway smell like an animal’s died twice over and no amount of febreze could mask the stench of its decomposing corpse.

 

She stares down at her muddied boots darkening the carpet and her role in lending to the putrid smell of the hallway fills her with a load of guilt. Perhaps this is her karma.

 

The stairs leading up to her apartment look peculiarly steep today for some reason and they squeak even louder than usual under the weight of her fatigued steps after that whole dirty bomb ordeal this morning.

 

“Five more,” she counts, “Four.”

 

She gropes around her bag for the key to her apartment, her mind almost fully detached from what the rest of her body is doing. Yesterday, she remembers, she tried to open the door to her apartment with a tampon. The thought tickles her for a second, but what comes out sounds more like a whine than a laugh.

 

The fatigue normally sets in for her around this time, somewhere between leaving the hospital and face planting on the couch because her bed is just _that_ far. But today was especially draining for her.

 

She finally finds the right key, but stops short when she hears a shuffling sound on the other side of the door.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Are people still following this? I know that it's been a year.
> 
> I just have this bad habit of not saving my work and getting extremely discouraged when a bunch of words are lost.

“You need to install a security system in this place. My house was burglarized the other day,” she says, not lacking in any melodrama as she slams both of her hands down on the super’s desk, perhaps a tad too hard as they throb with pain against the cold steel. But Clarke knows that she’d lose any ground she had if she backs down now.

 

The pudgy man attached to the thick mustache looks between Clarke and his powdered donut like he was just given some kind of ultimatum. He then stuffs his mouth full of the messy treat and wipes the excess sugar on his shirt. Clarke fights the urge to take ten steps back and wipe her hands along the side of the pants.

 

“Aren’t you…” he removes a tiny notepad from his shirt pocket and flips to the very last page. He squints at his own writing, “3b?”

 

“Yes. How did you---it doesn’t matter. This building needs better security.”

 

The man regards Clarke for a few seconds that seem to stretch for minutes. She admits to herself that she’s encountered some unpleasant situations working in the ER, but this was one of the rare moments when she felt thoroughly grossed out by someone.

 

“Have you thought about getting a guard dog?”

 

“A…what?!” She asks hysterically.

 

He sneezes loudly into the page that contains her information, “Sorry, allergies.”

 

Clarke considers it a sign that it was time for her to move out.

 

\--

 

“Interesting.” That was the third time she used that word tonight. Lexa admits that that’s a lot more to work off of than the incoherent mumbling Raven was doing in the beginning. But the word ‘interesting’ is so ominous and vague. It could be used to describe many things. Mystery food a person tries for the first time. A century old unsolved crime. Lexa doesn’t like ‘interesting,’ she likes facts and answers.

 

“What does interesting mean?” She grabs at Raven’s elbow to refocus her. “Don’t you think you’ve poked at my wrist enough for the night?”

 

She stares at Lexa for quite possibly the longest amount of time before something changes in her eyes.

 

“No.”

 

Lexa falls back against her chair, feeling the air deflate from her lungs. She stares blankly at the wall ahead of her. If she’s not mistaken, the long hand on the clock made two full revolutions since she sat down.

 

She closes her eyes, hoping that she’ll wake up from this dream where she’s not a lab specimen in Raven Reyes’ home. Slowly, she feels the tension lift from her shoulders and her mind begins to drift to that state of surface sleeping.

 

“Whoa, what do you think you’re doing with that?” She jumps the second she senses someone approach her with a scalpel.

 

“Relax, spidey,” she rolls herself closer to Lexa and asks for her wrist, “I’m just going to scrape off a bit of skin to look at it under a microscope. It’s already been Day 2. I need something to work with.”

 

“Don’t call me that.” The last thing Lexa wants is some kind of pet name. She lets out a sigh and offers her wrist begrudgingly.

 

“Well, I can’t think of anything more appropriate to call you when you’re shooting webs of silk from your wrists like a certain kind of arthropod.”

 

Lexa thinks about the first time she was bitten by a spider. That was when she first learned that she was highly allergic to the toxic venom. But this… _this_. She stares at her hands like she doesn’t recognize them anymore, like they belong to someone else. This is something much more than an allergic reaction.

 

“This isn’t the first time I’ve been bitten by a spider. That can’t be it.”

 

Raven asks her to go over the details of her morning again. “Anything you can think of, even if it’s the smallest detail. I want to hear about everything you did that morning.

 

“I dropped off a package at the UPS store before heading to Griffin and Parker. Then, I was bitten by the spider at the site of the accident.”

 

“Hey, Raven…” Lexa’s voice trails off, “Thank you for making that call for me. I know that I put our operation at the firm in jeopardy with my no show.”

 

“Psh.” Raven waves a hand in air to as to say it was nothing. Lexa wants to say more, but words of sentiment are as uncommon between them as special, spider abilities within the human population. So she decides to stick to what she knows best.

 

“Oh!” Her eyes widen at the memory. “There was a lunatic behind the wheel who yelled at me.”

 

“Was the lunatic a spider?”

 

“What?” Lexa asks, confused, “No, she wasn’t.”

 

“Then, she’s probably not significant.”

 

-

 

Clarke thanks her lucky stars for finding an apartment so soon and her old landlord for not putting up much of a fight when she asked to break her lease. A burglary would do that.

 

Though, it seems the super was sad to see her go.

 

_I’ll miss you, 3b._

 

Clarke wipes her hands along the side of her pants at the thought.

 

No more burglaries and whiney men, she tells herself and focuses on the map in front of her again.

 

Clarke knows that the best way to familiarize herself with the new area would be to take the train around town for a few weeks. The trouble with that is that there are about seven different rail lines coming in and out of the city, and she’s unable to decipher which line to take to get to her nearest post office right now.

 

“Where are you going?” Someone asks her.

 

She turns around and searches for the voice but doesn’t meet any gazes. Surely, no one would care to pay her any mind in a subway station. People move like cattle in a herd as soon as the train doors open.

 

“Where are you going?” The person asks again.

 

The young boy sitting on a bench to her right waves for her attention and she breathes out a disappointed breath. For a second, she thought someone was going to offer her some real help.

 

“I’m looking for the nearest post office.” She shakes the envelopes in her hand to make her point to the kid. “Are you lost?” She asks him.

 

The boy hops off from the bench to come stand by her side. “I’m not lost. I’m just waiting for my train.” He proceeds to tell her that she must take the blue line to get to the post office at Hemford and that the next train arrives in three minutes.

 

“Wow, you must take the train a lot.”

 

“I do. I have to take the train home from school because my mom works until 5.”

 

 _Smart kid_ , she thought. He also tells her that his name is Aiden and that his mom works as a paralegal outside of the city. He takes the blue line home almost every single day at exactly 3:55 PM.

 

“That’s awesome, so we’ll get to ride the train together. My name is Clarke, by the way.”

 

Clarke extends her hand to the boy she’s quickly grown fond of, and he takes it without hesitation. Before she could get another in, a female voice comes on the intercom loudly to announce the arrival of the next train.

 

“Looks like that’s us.”

 

They watch as a group flock the door of the stationed train before the old passengers could exit. Clarke and Aiden decide to wait a few feet away from the huddle and only board when it’s clear that they weren’t going to fight someone to get through a four feet wide opening.

 

“That’s unbelievable. There are still empty seats.” Aiden leads her to the far corner excitedly and practically hops onto his seat. But the sound of something crumbling under his weight makes his face twist.

 

“Oh, no.”

 

He removes the broken glasses from the seat and stares at them with watery eyes.

 

“Am I in trouble?”

 

Clarke does her best to reassure Aiden that it was an accident that could happen to anyone.  


“Plus, glasses don’t belong on chairs. The only person to blame for this would be the owner.” She removes the glasses from Aiden’s hands carefully, “Hang tight right here for a second while I bring this to the conductor. Maybe the owner will come back for them.”

 

Clarke starts to make her way to the front of the train with the broken item in her hand and can’t help stare at the crack on the bridge of the frame. _Maybe the person will recycle them_.

 

She walks about only eight feet from Aiden before she notices a girl enter the train from the other side of the platform and stops right in front of Clarke with an annoyed expression etched on her face.

 

“It’s you.”

 

“It’s me?” Clarke asks dumbly before finally picking the girl’s face out from her memory.

 

Lexa stares at her broken glasses in Clarke’s hand.

 

“I must ask, do you take pleasure in my suffering?”

 

“What?” Clarke looks between Lexa and the broken glasses, “You…this.”

 

Clarke stumbles for words as she sways between apology and anger. But before she’s able to decide, the doors slide close with the voice over the speaker warning passengers that the train is about to move.

 

“Great. Nothing good happens whenever I run into you.” Of all the places she could be in New York City, Lexa wonders why the girl had to constantly be in the same place she was all the damn time, even when she decides to take the train. She’s surprised that girl hasn’t moved into her apartment building at this rate.

 

“Listen, this,” Clarke holds up the glasses, “Was not my fault. And you being stuck on this train was also not my fault. So I’d appreciate it if you stopped casting blame on me for your own misgivings.”

 

Lexa pinches the bridge of her nose in frustration, realizing that she’d be late for her conference call at 4:30. It’d be the second time this girl would make her late, not to mention the whole radioactive spider biting ordeal that turned her into some kind of alien. It’s been four days, and Raven still hasn’t figured out what exactly happened to her, which means that a cure would not on the horizon anytime soon.

 

“Stop,” she tells Clarke. Her voice is low, and Clarke falls silent at the warning. But before Lexa can speak, the train jerks abruptly and sends her body forward, inches away from colliding with the girl if she did not have the mind to brace herself on a nearby pole.

 

Clarke studies the frowning face in front of her. She’d be quite pretty if it wasn’t for her infuriating attitude, Clarke said to herself.

 

“Don’t even consider it. I’m not interested.” The girl steps back from Clarke, body swaying left and right from the turbulence.

 

“I wasn’t even…” The anger makes Clarke’s heart stutter, and she considers declaring to everyone within earshot that she’d never consider this girl a romantic prospect in a million years. But then comes a loud, screeching sound from the tracks that replace the petty thought in her head. The sound is so deafening that she has to cover her ears in pain.

 

The next series of events happen so quickly that it was over in a blink of an eye. Then, silence. There’s nothing but the distant sound of traffic above ground and the chatter of those unaware that a train’s derailed in the subway underneath them.

 

Minutes pass by before Clarke finally comes to. She feels pain when she wakes, and it’s in her left leg. Her vision is clear, but she’s convinced that it might be distorted because the train doors are set at the ceiling and ground instead of their normal places upright.

 

“What the…” She looks around and sees bodies unconscious or moaning in pain. Then she remembers that she told Aiden to stay put in his seat mere minutes ago and calls out for his name. No one responds and Clarke starts to wonder if she’s having a really vivid nightmare. She finally tries to stand, and the pain radiates through her entire left leg.

 

“Christ!” She cries out and steadies herself on the nearest structure, a reverted looking chair.

 

_What the hell is going on._

 

Clarke feels an item crack under her tight grip and opens her hand to find a pair of broken glasses. She stares confusingly at them like they’re some kind of foreign contraption before deciding to put them on to improve her vision. The right side of the glasses hang loosely off her face, but the train door is sitting to the left now instead of the ceiling, so Clarke believes that her vision is decidedly better.

 

“Whoa.” She starts to feel faint and trips over her own two feet. She finally gives herself up to darkness, but not before that small voice in her head questions when she started wearing glasses.

 

Clarke comes in and out of consciousness a few times after that, but not long enough to fully understand what’s going on around her. However, she does become aware of someone lifting her up from the ground and carrying her away. The person is mumbling something beneath their breath, but it’s so low that even straining her ears wouldn’t help. But in her cloud of haze, Clarke can still make certain of one thing. The person sounds very displeased with her.

**Author's Note:**

> You must forgive me for the poor title. If something better comes up, I'll change it.


End file.
